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Sergio Pitol

Sergio Pitol Demeneghi is one of Mexico’s most acclaimed writers, born in the city of Puebla in 1933. He studied law and philosophy in Mexico City. He is renowned for his intellectual career in both the field of literary creation and translation, and is renowned for his work in the promotion of Mexican culture abroad, which he achieved during his long service as a cultural attaché in Mexican embassies and consulates across the globe. He has lived perpetually on the run: he was a student in Rome, a translator in Beijing and Barcelona, a university professor in Xalapa and Bristol, and a diplomat in Warsaw, Budapest, Paris, Moscow and Prague. Pitol is a contemporary of the most famous authors of the Latin American “Boom,” and began publishing novels, stories, criticism, and translations in the 1960s. In recognition of the importance of his entire canon of work, Pitol was awarded the two most important prizes in the Spanish language world: the Juan Rulfo Prize in 1999 (now known as the FIL Literary Award in Romance Languages), and in 2005 he won the Cervantes Prize, the most prestigious literary prize in the Spanish language world, often called the “Spanish language Nobel.” Deep Vellum has published Pitol’s Trilogy of Memory in full (The Art of Flight; The Journey; The Magician of Vienna), marking the first appearance of any of Pitol’s books in English.

Now Available from Deep Vellum Publishing:

The Magician of Vienna is the courageous final volume of influential Mexican writer Sergio Pitol’s Cervantes Prize-winning “Trilogy of Memory”, following The Art of Flight and The Journey. Weaving together fiction and autobiography, Pitol chronicles his life lived in literature as a way to stave off the advancement of a degenerative neurological condition causing him to lose the use of language as he writes this very book, the grand magnum opus crowning his timeless literary career.

This adventurous story, based on the author’s own travel journals, parades through some of the territories that the author lived in and traveled through (Prague, the Caucasus, Moscow, Leningrad) as he reflects on the impact of Russia’s sacred literary pantheon in his life and the power that literature holds over us all.

The Art of Flight, originally published in 1997, is the first book in Sergio Pitol’s “Trilogy of Memory,” a collection of essays and stories that blends the genres of memoir and creative essay in an imaginative swirl of reflection and contemplation.

About Us

Deep Vellum Publishing is a not-for-profit literary publisher that seeks to enhance the open exchange of ideas among cultures and to connect the world’s greatest untranslated contemporary writers of literature and creative nonfiction with English-language readers for the first time through original translations, while facilitating educational opportunities for students of translation in the Dallas community, and promoting a more vibrant literary community in north Texas and beyond.